Anyone who reads the article may be surprised to find that it contains literally no evidence to support the claim made in its clickbait headline. The author of the article comes to pretty different, much more limited conclusion:

Based on the analysis of packet captures above, I believe it is clear that anyone who has sufficient visibility into Telegram’s traffic would be able to identify and track traffic of specific user devices. Including when perfect forward secrecy protocol feature is in use.

This would also allow, through some additional analysis based on timing and packet sizes, to potentially identify who is communicating with whom using Telegram.

This is way more different thing than claiming and proving that Telegram is somehow FSB honeypot.

Furthermore, the author of the article does not even attempt to somehow prove a Telegram/FSB connection and takes this claim for granted based on the article published on websites of OCCRP and its Russian affiliate Istories. Let’s check this article and the evidence it presents:

Reporters obtained the company’s internal accounting documents for 2024 which show that one of its most important government clients is the FSB.

The documents show that Electrotelecom installs and manages equipment for a system that is being used by the FSB offices in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region for surveillance.

Unlike the conclusions made in the rys.io article, which have a vast evidence base and can be verified, in this case we are simply asked to take the word of the so-called “investigative journalism outlet”.

And what do we know about OCCRP?

In 2024, it was reported that OCCRP receives nearly half its funding from USAID

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organized_Crime_and_Corruption_Reporting_Project

I think that’s enough.

TLDR:

1. Telegram uses a suboptimal method of handling user IDs in its packets, which allows to track which user ID is sending messages to which user ID.

2. The Telegram/FSB link claim is based solely on unverifiable statements made by shills on USAID payroll.

While i’ve seen numerous well-argumented and thought-provoking posts disappear from ml communities over the last two years, almost everything that ends up in the YPTB community is some kind of bad faith trolling, flamebait and so on. The post above is good example; it might not be YDI but it’s clearly BPR. There’s definitely no valuable contribution here and if post like this got deleted from any other instance, it wouldn’t cause much drama.

Wow, that’s the real reason why the deleted comment isn’t quoted in the original post. That’s clear YDI case, the moderator did a good job by kicking out the bad faith troll.

No one speaks like that be it online or in IRL conversations.

Yeah, literally no one speaks like that be it online or in IRL conversations. You’ve just failed to recognize a fairly popular local meme (especially popular in previously predominantly Russian-speaking regions like Donbass). That’s okay, because the country you actually live in isn’t Ukraine.

Wherever you are

Wherever I am, I support an immediate end to the war through peace negotiations. Wherever you are, you preach the continuation of the war until your “hometown” too becomes the occupied (and bombed to the ground) territory. This is simply because you have nothing to do with Donbass, you have no relatives or acquaintances there who could die in the process, these are just some random words you read on Wikipedia. You are just some shithead troll sitting thousands of kilometers away.

The champagne bottles are waiting for you!

Ты же знаешь теорему Тарана, желаешь мне одну, а по итогу сам получишь две. Не знаешь, конечно, как и русский, как и украинский, как и ничего про Донбасс. Не страшно, через Google Translate переведешь. В общем, иди на хуй, я уже понял, что ты просто пиздобол.

You should be aware that despite his claims, Skiluros is not from Ukraine, and more precisely, not from the region he claims to be from. Most likely, he has never been there, as he fails to recognize some basic local jokes (check our conversation in this thread). He’s just a NAFO troll who pretends to be Ukrainian so that some unaware people will take his crap more seriously.

I freely admit that I (luckily) don’t live in Ukraine now - and neither do you, but you’ve never lived there either, and are now trying to hide that fact.

After your rants about web translators, I’m sure of it, because the very first time I asked about a pretty specific thing in a pretty specific way. If you really are from one of the cities that are currently under Russian control (as you’ve been trying to claim in posts in other communities where no one has been able to call your bluff), you’d recognize it easily. Moreover, I used some other local political memes that you didn’t catch. Since you’re not from Ukraine, you can’t speak Ukrainian, you don’t know common local stuff and you have no connection to Ukraine at all. You’re doing your “online roleplay”, but you’re failing miserably at the most easiest checks.

I have no idea where you actually live - in the EU or the US, in any case, for you, Ukrainians are some random aboriginals from a country that you couldn’t point out on a map a few years ago, you don’t really care how many Ukrainians will die tomorrow, as for you it’s no more than a some online moniker, and that’s why your comments at all instances are full of some kind of shithead warmongering propaganda.

And the funniest thing is that if you would start your roleplay at .world or shitJW, their users would happily upvote your crap and eagerly consume misinformation from fake Ukrainian. Because they are not at all against the misinformation if it suits their tastes.

Що, не розумієш рідної мови, рагуль?

Well the fact here is that you don’t speak Ukrainian (while i do) and you’ve never lived in Ukraine (while I did as a kid). You’re just NAFO scum from some other country posing as Ukrainian to promote your bullshit propaganda. It’s obvious that all your knowledge of Ukraine comes from the media, not from your own life experience. Now, once you were exposed, you can get fucked.

Чому не державною, лайно?

I bet that at best you are a troll posing as a Ukrainian, and at worst one of those shithead clowns who managed to cross the border and are now gathering in the centres of Western capitals, protesting against ending war through negotiations so that other Ukrainians would continue to die while they are chilling in Berlin, Paris or Warsaw. Or worse, you’re one of those guys who wears a woman’s wig when going grocery shopping to avoid getting caught by TCC, and then returns home to continue his crusade in the comments of Telegram or Facebook for the glory of the Great Democratic Leader Bonevtik Zelensky. Anyway, you’re shit in either case.

This is PTB, sure, but you’re not new to Lemmy and you should already know that the average .world user has no problem with Ukrainians being used as proxy cannon fodder, so there’s a strong BPR vibe here too. You’re literally diving into the cesspool of Western narratives and then being shocked that it stinks.

However, let it be noted that the post is in violation of the sidebar rules

This is certainly a valid point, however, your words are equally true of PhilipTheBucket’s original report where they are also fully a third-party.

Are you also claiming that PhilipTheBucket acted in bad faith? Would you report both posts (if you’ll finaly decide to take an action), not just this one? Could you please clarify your position if your answer is “no”.